Strata: A Logic Puzzle About Weaving Ribbons
Be-ribboned
Last night I found Strata [official site] - a puzzle game about layering ribbons on top of each other and thought I would share it. It's cute and smart and pretty as well as challenging.
It's not a new game but I thought I should share it with you as we haven't written about it before I don't think so here goes!
To explain:
I found Strata because I was looking for a puzzle game to distract me from my unhealthy relationship with Hexcells. I love games which are based around logic which is how I have racked up hundreds of hours on various Picross-type games. It's what attracts me to Nurikabe and Sudoku and it's what led me to Hexcells.
Hexcells gives you information which you use to work out which hexagons to fill in and which to make blank on a grid. I have all three Hexcells and I've been trying to work out if a couple of the puzzles involve a tiny bit of guesswork or if I am missing a step.
As a result I've run each puzzle multiple times checking for logical leaps and then I started doing little speed runs of them. Unfortunately my memory is largely visual and so I started to remember where the various filled in cells are and it kept getting in the way of checking so I was just replaying them. And then there's infinite mode...
45 hours in it was time for something new.
Strata is a game about layering ribbons, as I said. What happens is you get given a grid of squares. Some are marked a particular colour. You have to lay ribbons over the grid in such a way that the top ribbon on a particular grid square matches the colour of the square.
If you get stuck you can get hints that tell you which colour ribbons go in particular rows or the order you need to place ribbons. That's important because, if you haven't guessed from the name, the whole game is structured around how the layering works.
I'm maybe an hour in and I do find it charming. The sets of puzzles seem to have a slightly odd progression in terms of difficulty because I think they're sort of themed around different ribbon colours so you'll go from something a bit tricky at the end of one section to something really simple just in different colours at the start of the next.
The thing I really like is that you have to think in terms of 3D spatial logic instead of the 2D that the rest of the logic puzzlers I play involve. The chimes as you fill in the grid are a lovely touch too (it has that in common with Hexcells too).
It started off as a mobile game so it's available on iOS and Android as well as via Steam.